Joseph Stalin and antisemitism
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The accusation that
Early years
No aspect of Stalin's upbringing in
Stalin's earliest antisemitic rhetoric appears in relation to the rivalry between the
Not less interesting is the composition of the congress from the standpoint of nationalities. Statistics showed that the majority of the Menshevik faction consists of Jews—and this of course without counting the Bundists—after which came Georgians and then Russians. On the other hand, the overwhelming majority of the Bolshevik faction consists of Russians, after which come Jews—not counting of course the Poles and Letts—and then Georgians, etc. For this reason one of the Bolsheviks observed in jest (it seems Comrade Aleksinsky) that the Mensheviks are a Jewish faction and the Bolsheviks a genuine Russian faction, so it would not be a bad idea for us Bolsheviks to arrange a small pogrom in the party.[6]
1917 to 1930
Although the Bolsheviks regarded all religious activity as counter-scientific superstition and a remnant of the old pre-communist order, the new political order established by Lenin's Soviet after the Russian Revolution ran counter to the centuries of antisemitism under the Romanovs.
The
As
In his December 1922 letters, the ailing Lenin (whose health left him incapacitated in 1923–1924) criticized Stalin and
After the incapacitated Lenin's death on 21 January 1924, the party officially maintained the principle of collective leadership, but Stalin soon outmaneuvered his rivals in the Central Committee's Politburo. At first collaborating with Jewish and half-Jewish Politburo members Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev against Jewish arch-rival Leon Trotsky, Stalin succeeded in marginalizing Trotsky. By 1929, Stalin had also effectively marginalized Zinoviev and Kamenev as well, compelling both to submit to his authority. The intransigent Trotsky was forced into exile.
According to Polish historian, Marian Kamil Dziewanowski, Kamenev was denied the position of Chairman of the Soviet Union on Stalin's suggestion due to his Jewish origins. Stalin favoured Alexei Rykov and placed him in the position due to his Russian, peasant background.[11]
When Boris Bazhanov, Stalin's personal secretary who had defected to France in 1928, produced a memoir critical of Stalin in 1930, he alleged that Stalin made crude antisemitic outbursts even before Lenin's death.[12]
1930s to 1940s
Stalin's 1931 condemnation of antisemitism
On 12 January 1931, Stalin gave the following answer to an inquiry on the subject of the Soviet attitude toward antisemitism from the Jewish News Agency in the United States:
National and racial chauvinism is a vestige of the misanthropic customs characteristic of the period of cannibalism. Anti-semitism, as an extreme form of racial chauvinism, is the most dangerous vestige of cannibalism.
Anti-semitism is of advantage to the exploiters as a
lightning conductorthat deflects the blows aimed by the working people at capitalism. Anti-semitism is dangerous for the working people as being a false path that leads them off the right road and lands them in the jungle. Hence Communists, as consistent internationalists, cannot but be irreconcilable, sworn enemies of anti-semitism.In the U.S.S.R. anti-semitism is punishable with the utmost severity of the law as a phenomenon deeply hostile to the Soviet system. Under U.S.S.R. law active anti-semites are liable to the death penalty.[13]
Establishment of Jewish Autonomous Oblast
To offset the growing Jewish national and religious aspirations of
Great Purge
Stalin's harshest period of mass repression, the
German–Soviet rapprochement and the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact
During his meeting with Nazi Germany's foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, Stalin promised him to get rid of the "Jewish domination", especially among the intelligentsia.[21] After dismissing Maxim Litvinov as Foreign Minister in 1939,[22] Stalin immediately directed incoming Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov to "purge the ministry of Jews", to appease Hitler and to signal Nazi Germany that the USSR was ready for non-aggression talks.[23][24][25]
Antisemitic trends in Stalin's policies were fueled by his struggle against Leon Trotsky and his global base of support.[26][27]
In the late 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s far fewer Jews were appointed to positions of power in the state apparatus than previously, with a sharp drop in Jewish representation in senior positions evident from around the time of the beginning of the late 1930s rapprochement with Nazi Germany. The percentage of Jews in positions of power dropped to 6% in 1938, and to 5% in 1940.[28]
Relocation and deportation of Jews during the war
Following the Soviet invasion of Poland, Stalin began a policy of deporting Jews to the Jewish Autonomous Oblast and other parts of Siberia. Throughout the war, similar movements were executed in regions considered vulnerable to Nazi invasion with the various target ethnic groups of the Nazi genocide. When these populations reached their destinations, work was oftentimes arduous and they were subjected to poor conditions due to lack of resources caused by the war effort.[29]
After World War II
The experience of the
The Jewish Autonomous Oblast experienced a revival as the Soviet government sponsored the migration of as many as 10,000 Eastern European Jews to Birobidzhan in 1946–1948.
Israel
From late 1944 onward,
Nonetheless, Stalin began a new purge by repressing his wartime allies, the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. In January 1948, Solomon Mikhoels was assassinated on Stalin's personal orders in Minsk. His murder was disguised as a hit-and-run car accident. Mikhoels was taken to an MGB dacha and killed, along with his non-Jewish colleague Golubov-Potapov, under supervision of Stalin's Deputy Minister of State Security Sergei Ogoltsov. Their bodies were then dumped by the side of a road in Minsk.[35][36]
Despite Stalin's initial willingness to support Israel, various historians speculate that antisemitism in the late 1940s and early 1950s was motivated by Stalin's possible perception of Jews as a potential "fifth column" in light of a pro-Western Israel in the Middle East. Orlando Figes suggests that
"After the foundation of Israel in May 1948, and its alignment with the USA in the Cold War, the 2 million Soviet Jews, who had always remained loyal to the Soviet system, were portrayed by the Stalinist regime as a potential fifth column. Despite his personal dislike of Jews, Stalin had been an early supporter of a Jewish state in Palestine, which he had hoped to turn into a Soviet satellite in the Middle East. But as the leadership of the emerging state proved hostile to approaches from the Soviet Union, Stalin became increasingly afraid of pro-Israeli feeling among Soviet Jews. His fears intensified as a result of Golda Meir's arrival in Moscow in the autumn of 1948 as the first Israeli ambassador to the USSR. On her visit to a Moscow synagogue on Yom Kippur (13 October), thousands of people lined the streets, many of them shouting Am Yisroel Chai! (The People of Israel Live!)—a traditional affirmation of national renewal to Jews throughout the world but to Stalin a dangerous sign of 'bourgeois Jewish nationalism' that subverted the authority of the Soviet state."[37]
Historians Albert S. Lindemann and Richard S. Levy observe: "When, in October 1948, during the high holy days, thousands of Jews rallied around Moscow's central synagogue to honor Golda Meir, the first Israeli ambassador, the authorities became especially alarmed at the signs of Jewish disaffection.
Purges
In November 1948, Soviet authorities launched a campaign to liquidate what was left of Jewish culture. The leading members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee were arrested. They were charged with treason, bourgeois nationalism, and planning to set up a Jewish republic in Crimea to serve American interests. The Museum of Environmental Knowledge of the Jewish Autonomous Oblast (established in November 1944) and The Jewish Museum in Vilnius (established at the end of the war) were closed in 1948.[40] The Historical-Ethnographic Museum of Georgian Jewry, established in 1933, was shut down at the end of 1951.[40]
In Birobidzhan, the various Jewish cultural institutions that had been established under Stalin's earlier policy of support for "proletarian Jewish culture" in the 1930s were closed between late 1948 and early 1949. These included the Kaganovich Yiddish Theater, the Yiddish publishing house, the Yiddish newspaper Birobidzhan, the library of Yiddish and Hebrew books, and the local Jewish schools.[41] The same happened to Yiddish theaters all over the Soviet Union, beginning with the Odessa Yiddish Theater and including the Moscow State Jewish Theater.
In early February 1949, the
During the night of 12–13 August 1952, remembered as the "
In a 1 December 1952 Politburo session, Stalin announced: "Every Jewish nationalist is the agent of the American intelligence service. Jewish nationalists think that their nation was saved by the USA. . . They think they are indebted to the Americans. Among doctors, there are many Jewish nationalists."[44] He also quoted Jean-Jacques Rousseau's "eat the rich" in this speech.[citation needed].
A notable campaign to quietly remove Jews from positions of authority within the state security services was carried out in 1952–1953. The Russian historians
The outside world was not ignorant of these developments, and even the leading members of the
Doctors' plot
In secondary evidence and memoirs, there is a view that the Doctors' plot case was intended to trigger mass repressions and deportations of the Jews, similar to the population transfer in the Soviet Union of many other ethnic minorities, but the plan was not accomplished because of the sudden death of Stalin. Zhores Medvedev wrote that there are no documents found in support of the deportation plan,[47] and Gennady Kostyrchenko writes the same. Nevertheless, the question remains open.[48]
According to Louis Rapoport, the genocide was planned to start with the public execution of the imprisoned doctors, and then the "following incidents would follow", such as "attacks on Jews orchestrated by the secret police, the publication of the statement by the prominent Jews, and a flood of other letters demanding that action be taken. A three-stage program of genocide would be followed. First, almost all Soviet Jews ... would be shipped to camps east of the Urals ... Second, the authorities would set Jewish leaders at all levels against one another ... Also the MGB [Secret Police] would start killing the elites in the camps, just as they had killed the Yiddish writers ... the previous year. The ... final stage would be to 'get rid of the rest.'"[49]
Four large camps were built in southern and western Siberia shortly before Stalin's death in 1953, and there were rumors that they were for Jews.
Similar purges against Jews were organised in the Eastern Bloc countries, such as with the
Associates and family
Stalin had Jewish in-laws and grandchildren.
In his memoirs, Nikita Khrushchev wrote: "A hostile attitude toward the Jewish nation was a major shortcoming of Stalin's. In his speeches and writings as a leader and theoretician there wasn't even a hint of this. God forbid that anyone assert that a statement by him smacked of antisemitism. Outwardly everything looked correct and proper. But in his inner circle, when he had occasion to speak about some Jewish person, he always used an emphatically distorted pronunciation. This was the way backward people lacking in political consciousness would express themselves in daily life—people with a contemptuous attitude toward Jews. They would deliberately mangle the Russian language, putting on a Jewish accent or imitating certain negative characteristics [attributed to Jews]. Stalin loved to do this, and it became one of his characteristic traits."[65] Khrushchev further professed that Stalin frequently made antisemitic comments after World War II.[66]
Analyzing various explanations for Stalin's perceived antisemitism in his book The Lesser Terror: Soviet State Security, 1939–1953, historian Michael Parrish wrote: "It has been suggested that Stalin, who remained first and foremost a Georgian throughout his life, somehow became a 'Great Russian' and decided that Jews would make a scapegoat for the ills of the Soviet Union. Others, such as the Polish writer Aleksander Wat (himself a victim), claim that Stalin was not an antisemite by nature, but the pro-Americanism of Soviet Jews forced him to follow a deliberate policy of antisemitism. Wat's views are, however, colored by the fact that Stalin, for obvious reasons, at first depended on Jewish Communists to help carry out his post-war policies in Poland. I believe a better explanation was Stalin's sense of envy, which consumed him throughout his life. He also found in Jews a convenient target. By late 1930, Stalin, as [his daughter's] memoirs indicate, was suffering from a full-blown case of antisemitism."[67]
In Esau's Tears: Modern Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews, historian Albert S. Lindemann wrote: "Determining Stalin's real attitude to Jews is difficult. Not only did he repeatedly speak out against anti-Semitism but both his son and daughter married Jews, and several of his closest and most devoted lieutenants from the late 1920s through the 1930s were of Jewish origin, for example Lazar Moiseyevich Kaganovich, Maxim Litvinov, and the notorious head of the secret police, Genrikh Yagoda. There were not so many Jews allied with Stalin on the party's right as there were allied with Trotsky on the left, but the importance of men like Kaganovich, Litvinov, and Yagoda makes it hard to believe that Stalin harbored a categorical hatred of all Jews, as a race, in the way that Hitler did. Scholars as diverse in their opinions as Isaac Deutscher and Robert Conquest have denied that anything as crude and dogmatic as Nazi-style anti-Semitism motivated Stalin. It may be enough simply to note that Stalin was a man of towering hatreds, corrosive suspicions, and impenetrable duplicity. He saw enemies everywhere, and it just so happened that many of his enemies—virtually all his enemies—were Jews, above all, the enemy, Trotsky." Lindemann added that "Jews in the party were often verbally adroit, polylingual, and broadly educated—all qualities Stalin lacked. To observe, as his daughter Svetlana has, that 'Stalin did not like Jews,' does not tell us much, since he 'did not like' any group: His hatreds and suspicions knew no limits; even party members from his native Georgia were not exempt. Whether he hated Jews with a special intensity or quality is not clear."[68]
See also
- History of the Jews in the Soviet Union
- The Hitler Book
- Population transfer in the Soviet Union
- Soviet Anti-Zionism
- Soviet pro-Arab propaganda
- Antisemitism in the Soviet Union
References
- ^ Tolstoy, Nikolai (1981). Stalin's Secret War. Holt, Rinehart and Winston. p. 27f.
- ^ Johnson, I. O. (2021). Faustian Bargain: The Soviet-German Partnership and the Origins of the Second World War. Oxford University Press.
- ^ Moorhouse, R. (14 October 2014). The Devils’ Alliance: Hitler’s Pact with Stalin, 1939-1941. Basic Books.
- ^ Vladimir P. Brent, J. & N. (2003). Stalin's Last Crime: The Doctor’s Plot. Harper Collins.
- ^ Hornsby, R. (2023). "Chapter 3: Time to talk about Stalin". The Soviet Sixties. Yale University Press.
- ^ ISBN 978-0-521-38926-6.
- ^ ISBN 978-0-521-38926-6.
- ^ Lenin, V. I. (1919). "Anti-Jewish Pogroms". Lenin's Collected Works, 4th English Edition. Trans. George Hanna. Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1972 Volume 29, pages 252–253 http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1919/mar/x10.htm Marxists Internet Archive. Retrieved 23 February 2011.
- ^ Lenin, V. I. "The Question of Nationalities or "Autonomisation". In Lenin Collected Works, Volume 36. Moscow: Progress Publishers. pp. 593–611. Marxists Internet Archive. Retrieved 23 February 2011.
- ^ Lenin, V. I. "'Last Testament' Letters to the Congress". In Lenin Collected Works, Volume 36. Moscow: Progress Publishers. pp. 593–611. Marxists Internet Archive. Retrieved 23 February 2011.
- ISBN 978-0-13-097852-3.
- ISBN 963-9241-19-9, p. 287.
- ^ Joseph Stalin. "Reply to an Inquiry of the Jewish News Agency in the United States". Works, Vol. 13, July 1930 – January 1934. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1954. p. 30.
- ISBN 0-312-42803-0.
- ISBN 978-0-231-06350-0.
- ^ Igolkin, Alexander (2002). "Умение ставить вопросы". "Наш современник" N5. Retrieved 4 February 2011. (in Russian)
- ISBN 978-0-8021-1924-7.
- ISBN 978-0-253-33784-9.
- ISBN 978-0-231-06350-0.
- ISBN 0-385-47954-9(paperback) Ch. 24
- ISBN 5-85646-097-9, page 208 (Russian: Яковлев А. Сумерки. Москва: Материк 2003 г.
- ISBN 0-674-02175-4
- ^ Alastair Kocho-Williams, "The Soviet diplomatic corps and Stalin's purges." Slavonic and East European Review 86.1 (2008): 90-110.
- S2CID 153557275
- ISBN 1-84331-034-1, p. 283.
- ISBN 0-7146-4619-9, pp. 103–6.
- ISBN 1-57607-084-0, p. 297.
- ^ Gennady Коstyrchenko "Stalin's secret policy: Power and Antisemitism"("Тайная политика Сталина. Власть и антисемитизм" Москва, "Международные отношения", 2003)
- ^ How Joseph Stalin (Inadvertently) Saved Some Of Poland’s Jews, http://www.ibtimes.com/how-joseph-stalin-inadvertently-saved-some-polands-jews-1099571
- ^ ISBN 978-0-520-20990-9.
- ^ Paul Johnson, A History of the Jews (1987) p. 527
- ^ UN General Assembly Resolution 181 Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs
- ^ Recognition of Israel JSTOR - The American Journal of International Law, Vol. 4, No. 3, July 1948.
- ^ Norman Berdichevsky (20 September 2010). "Israel's Allies in 1948; The USSR, Czechoslovakia, American Mainline Churches and the Left".
- ISBN 0-393-04818-7, page 101
- Deutch, Mark (6 September 2005). "Как убивали Mихоэлса". Moskovskij Komsomolets (in Russian). Archived from the originalon 27 May 2007.
- ISBN 978-0-312-42803-7.
- ISBN 978-0-19-923503-2.
- ISBN 978-0-253-33784-9
- ^ ISBN 978-0-521-38926-6.
- ISBN 978-0-521-38926-6.
- ISBN 978-5-7390-1235-7. (in Russian)
- ISBN 978-5-7390-1235-7. (in Russian)
- ISBN 978-0-19-923503-2.
- ISBN 978-1-85043-980-6.
- ISBN 978-1-56324-499-5.
- ^ Medvedev, pp. 238–239
- ^ Samson Madiyevsky,"1953 год: ПредстоЯла ли советским евреЯм депортациЯ?"
- PMID 12493677.
- ^ Brent & Naumov 2003, p. 295.
- ^ ISBN 978-0-7146-5050-0.
- ^ Brent & Naumov 2003, pp. 47–48, 295.
- ^ a b c Eisenstadt, Yaakov, Stalin's Planned Genocide, 22 Adar 5762, March 6, 2002.
- ^ Brent & Naumov 2003, pp. 298–300.
- ^ Solzhenitzin, Alexander, The Gulag Archipelago, 1973.
- ISBN 5-85646-059-6(Наш советский новояз. Маленькая энциклопедия реального социализма.), "Persons of Jewish ethnicity", pages 287–293.
- ISBN 978-1-4718-3782-1.
- ^ Sheila Fitzpatrick (2015). On Stalin's Team. Carlton: Melbourne University Press. p. 217.
- ^ See also: Boris Berezovsky, The Art of Impossible (Falmouth, MA: Terra-USA, 2006), 3 vols, "There was a neighbor called Moroz who used to be married to Stalin's daughter Svetlana Allilueva. Our families spent a lot of time together. Now my daughter Liza has married a son of Svetlana and Moroz, thus giving to me a grandson who is also a great-grandson of Josef Stalin."
- ^ a b Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar. New York: Random House Inc. 2003.
- ISBN 978-0-300-11204-7.
- ^ "То, что Каплер – еврей, раздражало его, кажется, больше всего."
- ^ N. Tolstoy, ibib., p. 24.
- ISBN 978-1-4000-7678-9.
- ISBN 978-0-271-02861-3
- ISBN 978-0-271-02861-3
- ISBN 978-0-275-95113-9.
- ISBN 978-0-521-79538-8.
Further reading
- Arkady Vaksberg (1994). Stalin Against The Jews, tr. ISBN 0-679-42207-2
- Louis Rapoport (1990). Stalin's War Against the Jews. ISBN 0-02-925821-9
- Emil Draitser (2008). Shush! Growing up Jewish under Stalin. ISBN 978-0-520-25446-6
- Korey, William. “The Origins and Development of Soviet Anti-Semitism: An Analysis.” Slavic Review, vol. 31, no. 1, 1972, pp. 111–135. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2494148.
- Ginsburg, Michael. Reviewed Work: The Jews in the Soviet Union by Solomon M. Schwarz, Alvin Johnson, Syracuse University Press, 1951, Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society, vol. 42, no. 4, 1953, pp. 442–449. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43059911.
- András Kovács (ed.) Communism’s Jewish Question. Jewish Issues in Communist Archives, 2017, Walter de Gruyter. e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-041159-1
External links
- Stalin's Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (introduction) by Joshua Rubenstein
- 50th anniversary of the Night of the Murdered Poets National Coalition Supporting Soviet Jewry 12 August 2002, Letter from President Bush, links
- Seven-fold Betrayal: The Murder of Soviet Yiddish by Joseph Sherman
- Unknown History, Unheroic Martyrs by Jonathan Tobin
- (in Russian) Не умри Сталин в 1953 году... (If Stalin Had Not Died in 1953) by Yoav Karni (BBC in Russian language)
- Russian political parties and antisemitism
- Mircea Rusnac, http://www.banaterra.eu/romana/rusnac-mircea-un-proces-stalinist-implicand-,,agenti-imperialisti%22-evrei-si-social-democrati
- Central Intelligence Agency, Office of Current Intelligence. Foreign Broadcasts/Attitudes towards Soviet Leaders/Anti-Semitism, 16 April 1952.